What is Tetris?
by M. Soames
Summary: Pseudo intellectuals discuss Tetris.  In their latest adventure, the gang navigates wine and Tetris and more in San Fran on April 20, 2012.
1. Wine and Tetris

"What is Tetris?" I say this only half-aloud, mostly to myself, fearful of how my three friends may respond to this inquiry.

"Tetris is the conflict of a man," the French provocateur posits. "Within the void of a man called his soul, there falls the germs of his nature: his violence, his genius, his pride, his perversion. And Tetris is his own management of these natures." He cocked his head to his left, peering at his near-finished glass of '71 d'Yquem. Between the four of us, we have already polished off two bottles of the '95 vintage. No, we are not diabetics – we are men of taste, of a very sweet taste!

"By that same reasoning," said the Italian, "Tetris shows the downfall of man, as he must sooner or later yield his ghost. Brzustowski's paper proves that defeat in the game is inevitable. Man unwittingly destroys himself."

"But there is a Hindu nature about it," the American amusedly remarks. "For after his defeat, the player can always start a new game."

We stare at the American. I found his joke worth a chuckle, but the Frenchman and the Italian, to my surprise, were serious.

After an extended and uncomfortable silence, I say "Tetris is all around us. We are Tetris. In a Sociological context" –here, a chortle by the Frenchman, but I continue – "when we behave in such a way that society find acceptable, and proactive, we are blocks who have 'fit in,' without a gap. When a man acts out, when he breaks with society, he may fulfill a gap, collapsing incorrect preconceived notions; or, he may stand in the way of progress, a threat, creating a gap, blocking the future's way."

"But what are these gaps?" the Italian asks.

"They are obviously the deficiencies of society, old man," the Frenchman hypothesizes. "Of course, Sociology as an academic discipline exists more as a concession for Psychology faculty rejects, some way they can make their way in the world without totally wasting their talents, even if this new discipline is – indisputably – an aberration."

We toast to the humorous character of Sociology, and a round of cannoli later, we go our separate ways.


	2. Sexism and Bigotry

"I just think it's disgusting that Tetris blatantly encourages sexism," the Frenchman exclaims as he refills his glass.

I make the mistake to inquire further: "_Blatantly_ encourages sexism?"

"Isn't it obvious? It's named after the move that cancels four lines, which is only accomplished with the straight block – clearly a phallic symbol – and, if anything, if you think about it, the game is bigoted, too, almost coming right out and condemning homosexuality."

"You've had too much to drink," our Italian colleague comments. Coming from him, the remark is extraordinary.

"It condemns homosexuality because of that damned _straight_ block."

The American tires of the matter quickly, telling the Frenchman "You are flagged. You're not having any more."

"I don't care if I'm not having any more! At least I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid that Tetris is some innocent children's diversion when it's all too apparent the game is trying to impose the same values set as generations of WASPs have pushed for hundreds of years."

Seeing her nearby, I call over our waitress and ask for our receipts. Too much booze, too much Tetris.


	3. Tetrominology

The Frenchman flicked his cigar before he puffed again, and sipped at his half-full glass of Chateau d'Yquem. "But where are these blocks, these tetrominos? What is the locale we see, we affect, when we play? Do these tetrominos fall through the air, or through water, or through the ether? If the lat, the void, are we to presume these tetrominos are made, have always been made, or are they willed to exist only as they appear before us? If willed, who has willed them? And why do we see them as descending, instead of ascending or moving from left to right or vice versa?"

At the cafe, discussing the blasted game yet again. Why my friends should deign such a lovely day for endless drivel on the topic I cannot deduce, although the Chatequ d'Yquem had by this point mellowed my demeanor significantly.

"Of even greater importance in our consideration here," the Italian insisted, "is whether we control the tetrominos in a role tantamount to no less than the transcendental fulfillment of the Nietzschean Ubermensch or are we, in light of our own mortality and even, dare I even think to say such a thing, fate – the tetrominos themselves, born over and over one generation on top of another, forgetting our pasts until our mistakes cancel out our species? The acceleration of descent as level builds upon level supports as much. It may even amount to nothing less than a profound critique of man's 'progress' in that the further along civilization, the more depraved are man."

Here, our German friend could not hold back: "Is the disconnect between the player and the game, bridged by our hands on the controller, akin to the _Metropolis_ idea of the heart as mediator between the head and the hands? Is this more cynical? As an unabashed – even advertised – 'Soviet' game, this is only a logical conclusion."

We could have left it at that, but the American saw fit to "contribute" to the dialogue: "But whither the very ontology of the tetromino? Perhaps an allusion, a code as the Soviets loved such things, to the Christian belief in an elect few who are not fallen, as all but the straight tetromino are in their forms totally insufficient, meaning they are incapable of triggering Tetrises."

Clearing his throat, he reached for his glass but saw it was empty, and continued: "The whole of it, really, may be an elaborate argument for the integrity of the human soul, the embryo in utero made up of cell after cell, changing into the final form of the fetus. In this way, taking into account that aforementioned Soviet context, Tetris is more a political and philosophical resistance to the basic Communist understanding of life and population control."


	4. Tetris is What?

TETRIS IS WHAT?

PART I: AN UNWITTING CROSS INTO THE ORBIT OF VICE

Lucidity is finally returned to me – unlike, as I see around me, the many bottles of Chateau d'Yquem imbibed these past four days.

This peculiar log of mine and my friends' ramblings, rantings and ravings about the Soviet Mind Game may appear to you, READER, as having already veered into unusual and even absurd abstract territories. But as a transition from late-Picasso to mid-Jackson Pollock disorients in an altogether odd way, so to this transition from cogent – though at times I'll admit sophomoric – banter, usually spurred on by consumption of the aforementioned beverage, to something else. Something from which I have spent the past five hours trying to divine meaning, only to astonish myself in the obscurity of what has transpired in the preceding time.

A modernist, I abhor the sentimental literary traditions of dime-store romance rags, but here I see I have already committed a grave sin: by my carelessness, I plopped you, READER, in media res, myself yet to tell this bizarre odyssey. Without any further incoherent vacillations, my record of the past four days' events:

We were to meet at the American's house around noontime. I rendezvoused ahead with the Frenchman at Bar Jules for brunch, each of us carrying two bags of Chateau d'Yquem for the eventual general meeting. A few mimosas in to our delectable morning course, I learned a little more about the Frenchman than I had known, and more than I wanted to know: he is a member of the Action Francaise, and donated sizable sums of Euros to Jean-Marie Le Pen; not only that, but he is one of La Pen's most active fund-raisers abroad. As the Frenchmen went on about his latest conspiracy – the Muslim population time-bomb or somesuch – with a tone that absolutely oozed Vichy, I tried for a while to keep myself comported. Talk of Tetris now? I needn't exhaust myself ahead of the big meet. So I weathered the right-winger for forty-five minutes, and afterward we traveled (by way of his obnoxious Ferrari, rented) to the American's house.

As if an omen for our general meeting – and the hell into which it evolved – several cars passed us by, full of young and oblivious faces, shouting about three numbers. I looked at the Frenchman, who appeared as confused as I felt, his right hand adjusting the volume of Gould's Goldberg Variations to drown out the drunken warbling from without the Ferrari.

Arriving at the American's house (a dreadful nouveau-Bauhaus conglomeration of rectangles, whose only saving grace may be the slimmer of a hint at all our prized game), we parked out front and noticed the Italian waiting at the door. Walking up to him, he told us we encroached upon his tenth minute in wait for the American, and the German had not yet appeared either. Not two minutes later, a shimmering black Mercedes rounded into view – whom else could it be? Of course our German friend had arrived, and the Italian filled him in on the state of the day. The German reported strange behavior from the native populace, noting as the Frenchman and I had to ourselves earlier the odd shouting of three numbers.

But no matter, ten minutes later the American arrived.

If only he hadn't taken his time. There's a great chance I would not lay out for you, READER, this embarrassing record if the American had not taken the time he had just before driving back to his house to do what he did. Had that never happened, I would remember more clearly the past four days.

The American let us in to the foyer, where we set down our bags and hung up our light jackets, as no ladies were to join us. We counted twelve bottles of Chateau d'Yquem between all five of us – two more than anticipated, as our host insisted we tap into his 1965 vintages. We brought our bottles to the great room, wherein a table was set with five slender glasses on a marble table, impossibly large. In front of the table and its five bar-stool seats I saw a projector screen and several consoles – we had resolved at an earlier meeting to up our ante on Tetris from theory to practice.

Sitting down at the table, the German nonchalantly inquired as to the significance of those three numbers the rest of us had heard sequentially shouted in our sojourns to the American's house. The American, with a bemused look on his face, explained to us the countercultural connotation of what had always unwittingly appeared to me an unremarkably innocent date (the Frenchman was disappointed in a funny way that the joyriding hooligans we noticed en route were not commemorating some other acquired anniversary of the day). Here, the American paused, and told us what held him up until his arrival. All but the Italian were shocked.

As he turned on an old NES, the American assured us nobody was allergic to the stuff, it had no lasting side-effects, and it would benefit greatly our play and practical analysis of Tetris.

Of course I was hesitant. But as I told you before, READER, I am a modernist, and reasoned that such would be wise to investigate for myself. If it affected my Tetris-play as much as the American said it would, and my contributions to our discussion, I reasoned it fare, indeed. So I was the first to accept. With my endorsement of this experimental endeavor, so too did the Frenchman and the German acquiesce. Only the Italian needed no convincing, repeating that he was fine with it from the beginning. He had already poured himself a glass of the Chateau d'Yquem.

The American left us for a moment, and returned with the apparatus for administering this means to a new mentality – an upright tube-type device without electrical wirings, relying on water and fire and the user's own interactions therewith. The Italian partook first, and the German followed him. I chose to be last, but before our gracious host (of course.)

So I breathed in – and here, I recount the rest of this regrettable ordeal mostly in the terminology that occurred to me at the time, replete with sometime nonsensical syntax. The words of my fellow Tetris-enthusiasts is recreated as best I can recall.

PART II: MAELSTROM

Breathing out, I noticed nothing immediately. A few more times, and still I was perplexed as to the mystery which would be unveiled or defrocked or the like.

Then I stood up.

The projector on, I heard the 8-bit strains from out a 7.1 system wired in the walls and as if tinkering in my own ear. The change is set in me.

I see my friends – my friends? My friends! Ha! Ha. – and one has already spilled his drink, the Frenchman or the German, or maybe it was me.

The Italian hold his slim and slender drink in left hand and in the right manipulates the NES controller as a man might some curvier robot built for love, near-stroking it – will he have a stroke? I tell the American I worry for this man – my friend? My friend! Ha! Ha. – and especially his health, but the American with that quintessentially American smirk you'd like to slap off his face like a Clark Gable movie anti-charm (editor's note: what terrible rambling, apologies READER, apologies!) and the American told me: "Stop spazzing, he'll be fine. Drink some more, it'll settle your nerves, like after Wimbledon last summer with Sheryl when she was still here and have you seen her?"

I replied I had not seen her.

"That woman!" bellowed the German. "That woman! If ever there's a lesson from Tetrominos, love hath no fury like a missed row."

The Frenchman stares intently at his glass, full of the Chateau d'Yquem, even near the rim of the glass, and he rests his hands on his lap. They appear flinching, as if he keeps meaning to move them, operate them, cause a change in his environment, but nothing more than flinching. I suspect we will see some great repression in his Tetrising.

And all the while I had not noticed the American moved to the NES, his turn up. The grand blocks projected so large on such a big screen. Primordial soup? Please. Tetris, Tetris. This is our origin.

"The sterile NES," the Italian commented. "Its square dimensions, like this neutered house."

"As if!" the Frenchman yelled. "As if! As if!" Well, to me it sounded AS IF he were trying to accuse somebody of something. The blocks almost appear larger and larger every time I see them.

"As if!" he continues. "As if! As if there were a plot behind it!"

"Behind what?" the American inquires.

"Behind this castration of the Japanese baby!" The Frenchman must've gone mad, he must've gone loony. "For their own country, you've seen it – the curves that would satisfy any of our burning tendencies, but no – not for this oversexed nation of fatties. Here it is sterile, to dig your grave deeper for the dishonor of the Emperor Hirohito."

"You are blind," the American answered firmly. "The NES of America is more sincere in its shell than the Famicom of Japan. In its square or rectangular proportions, it does not assume a form dishonest from its utility. It is an honest machine. It is unglamorous. You see the curves of the mere controllers for the X-Box 360 or the PS3? They assume their curviness as a lure –"

"Don't tell me this is going where I think it's going," I mutter, images of an awful white rectangle in my mind.

"Oh, alright. We have a know-it-all, I'm sorry but we have a Mr. Know-It-All here who can read minds, right?"

"I'm not saying that –" I turn, but things are spinning and colors are trailing. I sip more Chateau d'Yquem and start to pour myself some more. "I'm saying it's a natural leap from NES to Wii. But we all know –" and at this point I noticed I was pouring the Chateau d'Yquem onto the table, so I started pouring it into my glass which appeared more slender than before – "we all know the Wii is, really, a bad system, mired in standard definition."

The music crescendoed, as if an alarm. The American's luck had run out, and he handed me the controller. I heard him going on about his heresy in the background – heresy to a modern man such as myself, who accept everything as an article of option! – and arrange these Tetrominos according to their type, as if Chas Darwin himself categorizing and epistemologizing the rudiments of Tetrominology some summer ago in a sweaty bath. The glow of the screen is too intoxicating. The sound of the Russian 8-bit score has killed my ego, and now I am bricks forming more perfect line after line, cancellation after cancellation, clearing after clearing if you will, as if spaceships in some distant future could use a code of Tetrominos such as I am destroying, and renewing, increasing velocity and maybe – just maybe! – graduating beyond dogma to organism.

For the past half-minute, I had not noticed I lost my game, and the GAME OVER screen loomed over me. Where was I focused? The American asked for the controller from me, removing it from my hand in such a presumptive but playing at it as if it were unassuming way.

I sit down and drink from the bottle, noting to myself the roundness of the taste and the super-galactic rush of flavor into my mouth, a mere receptacle which deduces taste from as many random factors as the algorithm of our sacred cow, our djinni, our audioandevenvidoalchemist Tetris the Grand, born speaker of Cyrillic fonts and all, blue in a white border. But also the squareness of the taste, as all must be composed of our lovely Tetrominos in its basic level. I set the bottle down on the floor from above, it makes a hideous noise, and I examine my hands as if to read them like the old unenlightened fortune-teller who sought mere lines, whereas I, the informed modern man, scavenge for Tetrominoid formations. Maybe my own double-helix is all Tetris.

The American had walked up to me, and told me I needed to indulge more, apparently I "wasn't there yet." So I engaged his methodology again (editor's note: so unwise of me. The whole of this is so horribly regrettable. But the worst is yet to come.) The exhale markedly better this time, I noticed

"What?" I asked. Somebody had said something to me.

"The fair of the early eighteen nineties and how many pennies could be got and" what this had to do with Tetris I had no idea so I looked down and saw them, the Tetrominos, when I closed my eyes, arranging them in vain again and their shifting colors and again he called my name.

"Yeah. What?" I asked again.

I didn't know what he was saying. I found the American's kitchen, at least what appeared to be a kitchen, and found in his icebox a wrapped "burrito." On uncultured impulse I began to devour the thing, tasting Tetrominos.

What I remember next is more a slideshow of freeze-frame tableaux. Instead of our Tetris enthroned on the screen I see apostate Lumines. And then I see Tetris returned, a queer arrangement of bricks early on surely precluding the player from victory. A broken bottle of Chateau d'Yquem at the German's feet while the American laughs to somebody on his mobile phone. The Italian's crude attempt at Tetris origami by way of sandwich buns, while the Frenchman passes me the American's apparatus newly tendered for fresh use. Pillows and their feathers all over the floor in Tetromino formations. Blackness. Haziness and the feeling of hang-over, dispensed by the use of the American's apparatus yet again. More Tetris, the lights dimmed or knocked out by the Italian and the American. The German restrained by the Frenchman for a reason I do not recall, while the American uses his apparatus again. I use it yet again while the American orders eighteen pizzas from a local Papa John's or Pizza Hut or Domino's or something like that. My turn and seeing the Tetrominos which were at one time a part of my essence totally differentiated, as if by an equation or an invisible gulf, like something uniquely foreign to my body. Darkness again. Pizza everywhere. Communal shower in an huge chamber as red pizza sauce spirals down a drain, even using the damnable apparatus within such a begrudgingly "sacred" place. The answer seems so clear, but distant at the same time. We are no longer in our right minds, that much is apparent as we keep using the apparatus and eating and playing Tetris. Distress at night as we have nearly depleted the means by which the American's apparatus produces its effect, and his phone is in his hand as he is apparently delivered bad news. We use the apparatus one last time. Many women are running in the house and I do not know why they are here. I do not remember falling asleep but I am contorted on the ground with a woman in such a way as to suggest that sleep did, indeed, come – probably from exhaustion. Shower and coffee.

So the clarity is returned. The bottles are around, broken. Pillows and feathers and women are the wages of intoxicated Tetris. What is man? What is a man?

There is a piece of glass stuck in my back and I can't reach it. But despite the ill profit of our unexpected revelry, I feel at once calm and serene.

Is this life?

What is Tetris?


End file.
